Leading anti-Morsi group to launch election campaigns after Eid

Tamarod, or 'Rebel', the group responsible for the withdrawal of Egypt's confidence in ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, announced Monday they will be holding election rallies after Eid and rejected claims that it will cooperate with Mubarak-affiliated candidates.

Egypt's Tamarod (Rebel) movement has announced it will begin holding election rallies after the week-long Islamic holiday of Eid Al-Adha, which begins on Tuesday.

"Tamarod seeks to establish a large electoral coalition which will reflect the hopes of Egyptians [who demonstrated on] 25 January 2011 and 30 June 2013," the group's co-founder Hassan Shahin told Al-Ahram Arabic news website on Sunday.

The group announced last week it would contest upcoming parliamentary elections in all districts.

Shahin added that the movement had formed sub-committees to coordinate election rallies in Cairo and elsewhere, adding that the group would hold rallies in Upper Egypt where support for Islamists is still higher than in most northern cities.

Tamarod began in May as a campaign to "withdraw confidence" from Morsi by collecting 15 million signatures, exceeding the 13.2 million votes he amassed in the 2012 presidential election runoff. At the end of June, Tamarod announced it had collected 22 million signatures.

Tamarod participated in designing the transitional roadmap, implemented by the interim government via a constitutional decree on 8 July, which includes a referendum on an amended constitution, as well parliamentary and presidential elections all to be held within one year.

The anti-Morsi group has faced internal disputes and splits in recent weeks.

The group's outreach coordinator resigned in late September charging that some Tamarod leaders have been meeting with pro Mubarak figures.

The group is also at odds internally over who to support in the upcoming presidential elections with some members favouring Defence Minister Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi[4] and others leaning towards Nasserist leader Hamdeen Sabbahi.